Lit Review: America's History Through Young Voices

Despite the book's focus on the American curriculum (for which I have few primary sources), America's History Through Young Voices: Using Primary Sources in the K-12 Social Studies Classroom (2005) was extremely helpful to me. The book gives great explanations about primary, historical sources before discussing the five historical thinking concepts used in the United States. The following chapters each focus on one aspect of the K-12 curriculum, giving context about the content, reproducing parts of a young person's primary source, and providing questions or assignments modeled on the historical thinking concepts. Richard M. Wyman Jr. provides a resource that is practical and adaptable to any classroom.

Propaganda Posters get some mileage - and great attention

The Class

One of my favourite assignments was developed by an Education professor and me specifically for her class. The Archives has over 80 World War One recruitment, war bond, and Canada Food Board posters available both originally and digitally for our students. This assignment makes the most of the posters, relating them directly to the grade-school curriculum and using them as a teaching tool.

We bring the students to the Archives for a workshop with the posters. Using a few examples that I have pre-selected, the students work through the questions on their assignment as a practice run. The assignment is two-fold: one, the students answer questions from the perspective of students taking a secondary school history class; and, two, the students put together a lesson plan from the perspective of a teacher for that history class. Both the original and the digital posters are used in the assignment. (Here is the address for the posters: http://openarchive.acadiau.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/ww1posters)

The Conference

In October 2013, this assignment was the basis of a presentation made by the professor and me at the Nova Scotia Teachers Union conference for the Social Studies Teachers Association. Our presentation discussed the method for creating the assignment, the lesson plan, and the material needed. We also provided advice for practicing teachers who may want to adopt a similar assignment. Some attendees were former students who had done the assignment a few years ago and could speak from personal experience. I hope that more teachers will find these posters a helpful tool for instruction.

Note: An excellent secondary source to accompany the propaganda posters assignment is Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns that Shaped a Nation by Francis Daniel (2011).

Lit Review: Doing History

I just spent a few weeks reading the 4^th edition of Doing History (2011) by Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Baton. It took a while to read because of my extensive note-taking and section re-reading. Even though the focus of the book is on elementary and middle school students, the techniques can easily be adapted to higher grades and undergraduates. For me, a person without any background in education, sections of the book helped explain educational theory as it assists in the development of practical applications in the classroom and assignments. (In this regard, Chapter Two was especially helpful.) The book emphasizes these goals to drive instruction, as specified on page 9: ‘to prepare students for reaching conclusions based on evidence; to engage students in deliberations over the common good; and, to understand perspectives different than their own’. To do this, Doing History provides many examples of critical thinking assignments as well as the required assessment tools. All of the assignments demonstrate why studying the past is relevant to understanding the present by making global/local connections, finding themes, creating new ways to represent the past, and/or creating questions and doing the research to find answers.

My favourite example from the book is a chapter about building a history museum because it relates directly to a class that I teach. Now, I have some new ideas to incorporate. I feel that Doing History has a number of techniques that I can use to pull together my archives sessions and make them more effective for students.

Note: Don't have enough to read???  Three books that were also recommended to me are: Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts ; Reading Like a Historian ; and, Why Don't You Just Tell Us the Answer

An unexpected visit

My final class of the year was with a small group of high school students. Their teacher had been in one of my sessions when she was a student and wanted to bring some of her students to the Archives. Yeah! This is one of my goals for doing sessions with B.Ed. students.

I divided the allotted time into a combination of looking at records related to their curriculum, interesting books from Special Collections, and a tour of Archives and Special Collections. The exercises with archival documents were very short, asking only two questions about the content and allowing for some discussion time. I also gave them some information about the process of research. During the tour, I had laid out a few documents that I thought would catch their interest.

It all went very well. The documents and books that I selected did make an impact on them. They took pictures of the material they used. The group stayed longer than expected and had lots of questions during the tour. Indeed, we all learned a lot.

Where Did You Say You Came From?

During the summer, the prof of Canadian Immigration History and I discussed a number of ideas for the class session in September. We agreed on using the Archives to help the students practice for an oral history assignment. Who better to practice interview skills, I thought, than with dead people? There are both similarities and (significant) differences.

The session was divided into three parts: interviewing dead people, blind dating, and moving beyond the records. I brought in a few secondary sources about oral history to wave around during the session so that students knew they could get lots of help in the Library.

First up—an interview with a dead person, J.F. Herbin to be exact. You can find a similar lesson plan here (http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2012/07/counting-canadians.html ; for this class I did a modified version). We spent close to 30 minutes going through this guided example. I tell the students a few details about the individual and then quiz them about other sources of information. As students brainstorm a source, like a newspaper, I encourage them by giving out a copy of the newspaper and asking for details from that source. Every student gets a source to explore. In the end, we all have a piece of the puzzle and as a group put together the person’s life. This first part of the class demonstrated to the students what they needed to do during the following two parts.

Next was blind dating to give the students an opportunity to practice doing background research with archival records. Four groups of records had been pre-selected for this class, all related to immigration. Normally, I set out records and the students sit randomly at tables without knowing what records are there. But, I did something unusual this time; I told the students about the records that were on each table so they could choose to work with ones of interest to them and they chose where to sit. We spent 30 minutes looking at the records, doing critical analysis of them. The groups were given a sheet of critical analysis questions that I developed from Social Studies that Sticks by Laurel Schmidt (2007). They were asked to select one set of the questions and use them as a jumping-point to find major themes within the records, build categories of key concepts found in the records, and look for what is missing from the records. Each student in the group worked independently to prepare for the next part of the session.

Part three, moving beyond the records, was to prepare the students for an actual interview. You can find the basic lesson plan here (http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/thinking-outside-box.html). The groups at each table worked together to discuss a number of questions about the records. These questions were meant to provoke further discussion about forming interview questions for the assignment.

You may wonder about music for this class. I played Sting’s “Englishman in New York”, although I could have used “Illegal Alien” by Genesis.

This class was almost 90 minutes long, so I was able to do three, separate lessons, relate them, and offer them as one class. I think it worked well, giving the students lots of time to experience and guidance with the records. Many of the students returned to work on the research necessary for their assignment.

Lit Review: Broadening Student Understanding…

A good friend of mine recently brought my attention to an article in Social Education 77 (5), pp. 228-231, by Lee Ann Potter entitled “Broadening Student Understanding of Wartime Experience through Original Works of Art and Personal Accounts”. It is a most interesting article that discusses the incorporation of various sources (i.e., oral history, photos, correspondence, videos, etc.) to encourage critical thinking. The author outlines how this is done. Here's my take on what she said.

The students are provided with some sources and challenged to identify if they think any sources are missing. If so, what types of sources? Then challenged again to identify what the missing sources might add to their understanding of the event. As the new sources are provided, the students are asked to speculate on the creator, title, and date of the new item(s) and then create a list of questions based on these sources. After that list is built, the students are given the metadata about these items. As a group, the students discuss how this changes their view of the event. Then, the students are shown a video (or videos) that are directly related to the event, adding another dimension [I would love to do this with my classes]. The group discussion that follows incorporates the newest information from the video. How are the students’ views changed about the event or the items that reflect the event? Finally, the students are asked to read the relevant section in their textbook to build and understanding of the event. [Now comes the best part.] The students were asked to produce their own interpretation of the event based on the more-rounded information, using the various sources. [Are you wondering what my sessions might be doing next term? If I can find a class with which this will work, I will let you know!]

One From the Song Book

Some time in August, the planning began for a course for which I had done a session before, but not using my new methods. Of course, I had to completely change the session to incorporate speed dating, discovery, interrogation, and – yes – music. The prof, who is open to new things, was in total agreement. We decided to offer the session twice so that the class of 40 students could be divided into two sessions of 20, each lasting 1.5 hours in length. The class assignment was a choice of one with historic textbooks, an archival collection, a historiographic essay, or an oral history.

To get those creative juices flowing, part one was a speed dating exercise with the historic textbook collection – I called it Timeless Texting. I have used this method many times for various classes. The challenge is to select only 20 or 25 books out of the 2200 titles we have in this special collection, ranging in dates between 1800 and 1983 on all topics. Normally, the class has a subject area to which I can limit my search, but Educating Canadians covers the entire scope of this collection. I limited myself to two titles for each decade, spreading out the subjects as evenly as possible to provide comparisons. During the 30-minute activity, we discussed biases when approaching a book, making fun of old textbooks, and expectations on content. This was also an opportunity for me to explain the purpose of speed dating, which is not apparent to everyone. I explained that the students need to learn and practice skills for assessing a source and collecting bibliographic data – speed dating.

Between this exercise and the next one, I played some music for the students. Years ago, the Archives recorded the campus Choir singing and chanting Acadia-related songs and cheers. Many of the students had not heard these before. The music interlude was directly relevant to the class and the students enjoyed them. Very effective.

The next part was discovery with archival collections. As I have in other sessions, students were given five collections related to the topic with the correlating finding aid. They looked through the boxes for one item of interest, completed an information sheet, and we openly discussed the records and items at each table (lesson plan here: http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/hunting-and-gathering.html). The purpose was to practice gathering historical details and information. This part took about 30-minutes. Then, I had more Acadia-related music and song books to share with the students before we began the next exercise.

Part three was the interrogation section and would help with the oral history assignment. The purpose was for students to practice interrogating sources and to brainstorm new ideas. First, I instructed the students to switch tables. You see, in part two they had heard about the records at the other tables and I suspected that something may have caught their interest. Now was their chance to check out another group of records. After the switch, everyone selected one item, completed a sheet of questions, and then brainstormed about other sources of information that could be helpful. (lesson plan here: http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/thinking-outside-box.html). As the students packed up to leave, I played the song that is part of the Acadia convocation ceremony. Many had not heard it before, but everyone understood the significance of playing it at the end of this class.